As climate talk turns to climate silence, Bjorn Lomborg warns in the Telegraph that green-hushing is just the latest gimmick – unless it leads to real change. Here’s an excerpt:
After years of bragging about their climate policies, multinational businesses and international organisations are now going silent about their sustainability goals. They are no longer green-washing but “green-hushing”. Yet, green targets are bad for business and a terrible way to help the world. These actors shouldn’t just be quieter about them. They should stop this waste.
Perhaps the most blatantly self-defeating attempt to go green was by the fossil fuel industry. Back in 2020, BP made the extraordinary promise to slash oil and gas production by 40% by 2030, boost renewable energy generation twentyfold, and even become a Net Zero energy company. Since then, it has performed the worst among big oil, and two CEOs later, BP has now abandoned its green promises and recommitted to fossil fuel. Other big western oil companies are also returning to their roots – while state-owned oil giants like Saudi Aramco, Sinopec, Petrobras and Rosneft never made dramatic green promises in the first place.
These green pledges were always silly. Humanity has spent trillions on climate policy, but more than four-fifths of global energy is still supplied by fossil fuels. Over the past half-century, fossil fuel energy has more than doubled, with 2023 again setting a new record. Consumers and businesses want more energy. It is a foolish company that declares it will supply less. …
Yet, there are worrying signs that many companies are only changing their language, not their actions. A recent global survey of 1,400 corporate executives found that 58% of companies “are deliberately planning to decrease their level of external communications” about climate policies, even though most intend to spend even more on climate policies than before. In other words, for many companies greenhushing amounts to going greener, while lying about it by omission. Shareholders need to ask hard questions. …
Pivoting on language is easy. The real test is whether organisations like the World Bank and African Development Bank will dump poor ideas like ringfenced funds for climate mitigation. They need to return to the far-less glamorous basics: spending that improves nutrition for children; investment in agricultural research and development; tuberculosis eradication; improved learning outcomes for pupils.
The time for bad, green promises is over. For years, corporate and international organisation leaders were cheered loudly in Davos and beyond for promising to do silly, inefficient things. Now, fear of being called out by the Trump Administration appears to be a powerful motivator. But if they are only greenhushing, then shareholders need to make sure companies actually return to their core purpose. Similarly, policymakers in the UK and abroad must use their own shareholding power to get development banks back to actually helping the world’s poor.
Worth reading in full.
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